For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
Flowers achieve their own floweriness and it is a miracle. Men don’t achieve their own manhood, alas, oh alas! alas! All I want of you, men and women, all I want of you is that you shall achieve your own beauty as the flowers do. Oh leave off saying I want you to be savages. Tell me, is the gentian savage, at the top of its coarse stem? Oh what in you can answer to this blueness? …as the gentian and the daffodil… Tell me! Tell me! Is there in you a beauty to compare to the honeysuckle at evening now pouring out his breath?